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Talk:Bob's EA Abysia Comments/@comment-73.12.27.175-20160729033807
This is a fantastic overview of the nation, and I would like to suppliment it with a more or less full guide to the playing the nation, delving into more specifics of HOW you would translate EA Abysia into a winning nation beyond an overview of its strengths and weaknesses. Essay below, so if you don't feel like reading this might not be the comment for you :P I noticed that one of the crucial elements of EA Abysia was missing- their national mage. I would highly recommend at least one luck scale to boost chances of getting a flying, F3 S2 B4 demon mage who completely changes the options available to the nation. He opens up access to high end blood magic without having to use your pretender for that purpose. I would also highly recommend rushing construction 6 after the basic evocation research, this allows access to lightless lanterns to spend the ridiculous amount of fire gems you have in addition to getting the blood boosters, which can push your national mage high enough to cast soul contract and start massing demons before even getting into blood magic. Lifelong Protection for the flying demonbred assassins is simply game changing. This allows your only mobile units to have an impact on actual battles with minimal risk, in addition to being fantastic at killing enemy commanders. Excellent for raiding, excellent when several sit behind your armies in battles to generate an endless stream of flying freespawn chaff, excellent for taking out enemy commanders with little to no risk, all while being mobile enough to support multiple armies and simultaneously raiding in the process. Rushing construction early also means that the much cheaper and much younger warlock apprentice becomes a very attractive early cap recruit with the addition of early sanguine dowsing rods for bloodhunting. I would like to point out that while the Appointed of Rhuax is an absolutely stunning mage, he is cap only, slow to recruit, and costs a whopping 425 gold while only adding two extra magic, one of which is fire in an already fire heavy nation. An investment of this magnitude adds very little to the nation, and should be recruited in limited numbers, especially considering the other cap only commanders that are likely to have far more influence over the success of your game. I would recommend getting 2-3 early in the game to site search for earth/fire/holy, then refrain from buying any more until you have a specific purpose in mind for each and every one, such as turn 1 casting battlefield enchantments, divine blessing a sacred army, forging, or creating a thug chassis (which they are excellent at due to their wonderful stats and the single point in earth magic, frankly the fire magic is somewhat wasted here however and I personally find them to be too expensive to use in this manner very often). I have found that the best non-awake pretenders have two specific paths- Earth and Nature. Since Malphas the national hero provides the blood paths necessary to break into high blood, pretender points are better spent elsewhere, and fire magic on a nation with recruitable F4 mages is unneccesary. Earth magic however (I recommend at least E6) grants reinvigoration to all your non-warlock mages (and makes the Burning Ones somewhat more reasonable) and allows Abysia to break into earth with the Troll King's Court. Addintionally, because blood slaves are relatively cheap, empowering your god to B3 (or B1 and providing him with two boosters) allows access to bloodstones (IF you decide to spend the blood slaves this way). Most importantly, because it is a minor path of your nation, your Appointed of Rhuax mages can site search for it early and generate the earth gem income neccessary to make each pretender turn valuable (if your pretender is site searching, he isn't terribly valuable). Similarly, because indy mages so often have at least one path of nature, it is easy to obtain a few to site search and develop a moderate nature gem income early on as well. Then when your pretender wakes up he can take advantage of this immediately. I recommend N3 or N4, to cover two specific bases- thugging and patrolling. A decent thug is fatigue neutral or close to it, and stack defensive buffs. Since construction has already been researched, nature items such as Amulet of Reinvigoration, Amulet of Regeneration, and Messenger Boots perfectly round out the thugging toolkit when combined with the items the nation can already make naturally, such as firebrands, shield of gleaming gold, etc. More importantly, the N4 spell Call of the Wild creates a werewolf leader that can summon zero upkeep wolves. While valuable as chaff when placed at the front of an army to soak up enemy evocations/arrows, the more impotant use is free patrollers to patrol away any unrest from bloodhunting. To tie it all together, I recommend a E6 N3 imprisoned Neteret of Joy with Dominion 7, Order 2, Production 2, Heat 3, Growth 3, Luck 1, Magic 1. Order 2 because the cheapest unit Abysia has is 20 gold and to reduce unrest from bloodhunting, Production 2 because Abysia only has access to extremely heavy infantry, Heat 3 for obvious reasons, Growth 3 because quite a few mages are old, all the units are expensive, and to support heavy blood hunting, Luck 1 to try for the national mage, and Magic 1 to speed research. If I was to play around with that, I would consider dropping Order to 1, or consider going into Magic 0 or even Drain 1 (all of Abysia's non-cap mages are at least lvl 2 mages, so they can survive a drain scale. Plus if the first big research target is lightless lanterns the second your nation reaches Construction6 every single mage in the empire spends a turn forging himself a lightless lantern and triples research output). I would likely increase Luck or Production if you do decide to tweak the scales. Then produce mostly cheap Warlock Aprentices in your capital, using the savings to pick up mercenaries for expansion, early Annointed of Rhuax's for site searching, and infrastructure (forts). The warlock apprentices reseach until the first fort goes up, then use some of them to develop a limited blood economy. Research goals are first Evo3 for fireball, then right into Construction6 for lightless lantern. When Construction4 is reached, forge saguine dowsing rods for all your Warlock Apprentices and spread them out across the empire to truly bloodhunt, approx 1 per province (research will be handed by non-cap Salamanders at this stage, not the more expensive and old Dragons). Rotate bloodhunters between provinces as needed to control unrest. Abysians are too expensive to use as patrollers, both in upkeep and in opportunity cost. They should be conquering new and exciting enemy lands before enemy evocations can deal with the fire/armor. Assuming your Luck scales paid off and you have your national Mage Malphas (there is only one national hero, so odds are good), as soon as you hit Construction6 you can then forge the bloodboosters and immediately begin creating an endless stream of demons with Soul Contract. You should be making a Soul Contract every turn. If immediate combat is more of a concern, i recommend going straight to Lifelong Protections (at Construction4, so if you already have Malphas that can happen even earlier) and making Demonbred Assassins to carry them. Otherwise, have Malphas make a few blood boosters as any full Warlock with two boosters can forge Lifelong Protections, freeing up Malphas for the more important forging and summons. DO NOT FORGET to use every single Salamander you have to forge then equip a lightless lantern to dramatically boost research, this is the reason this guide is effective. Once you have Construction6 and Evo3, the next target is Conjuration3. Conjuration3 picks up Phoenix Fire to make all your research mages F3 when needed, summon Lesser Fire Elemental for battles, and Call of the Wild for your God to spam when she wakes up. Summon more wolves with the werewolf commanders and use indy commanders for the wolves themselves, patrolling away unrest. This should allow you to have two Warlock Apprentices with Sanguine Downsing Rods in each province instead of one, effectively doubling your blood income. You will note that since your Warlock Apprentices are cap only, your capital will be making mostly warlock apprentices all throughout the early to mid game, and then later will mostly be pumping out the flying Demonbred Assassins as fast as Lifelong Protections can be created. This means fewer full warlocks or Annointed of Rhuax's. This is intentional, as until you can use them for a specific purpose full warlocks and Rhuax's are both too expensive to mass. After that you have three choices. Alteration4, Conjuration6, or Evocation5+. Alteration4 combined with Construction 6 is what allows your Annointed of Rhuax to become thugs, between kitting them out and them selfbuffing with earth magic spells. I do not recommend this, with rare excpetions your capital should be producing Demonbred flyers or Warlock Apprentices, but if you do go this route this is when you would consider building larger numbers of Rhuax's. Evocation5 is probably the best, for falling fires, fire cloud, etc. Going all the way up to Evo8 for Pillar of Fire is typically a much later target, better after spells like Heat from Hell are up, but is a viable option. Alternately, if you aren't pressed militarily Conjuration 6 provides Troll King's Court for your god to cast, and allows you to fully break into the earth path as well as opening up the always excellent Flame Spirits to provide a purpose for your otherwise absurd fire gem income. Blood is not an option yet, you need to catch up on research using the Lightless Lanterns. You will be somewhat behind as you should have quite a few mages bloodhunting rather than researching, as well as a few providing fireball spam for your armies, not to mention that the majority of your blood slaves are being spent on forging rather than more traditional blood magic. When expanding avoid building Burning Ones, they take way too many resources to be produced in a manner that would allow you to expand with them. Instead stick to basic Abysian infantry while you expand and only switch to Burning Ones once expansion is over. I prefer the two-handed flail infantry, they are heavy infantry in an era without crossbows so the shield isn't necessary to ignore arrows and the damage output is much higher from the double attacks. Tankier shielded Abysian infantry may be better later when the mage corps are the damage source (or against enemies with longbows) and their role is to merely hold the line, but unless you are using a few as arrow catchers stick to the flails for expansion. The biggest weakness I find with this build is a lack of good commanders to lead the fire demon hordes spawned by your Soul Contracts. You lack death magic to make Mound Kings and your full Warlocks are the only recruitable units that have enough undead command to be worth using this way, but they simply don't take priority over the Warlock Apprentices, Demonbred, and occasional Annointed of Rhuax. The method of solving this issue is to either find an indy mage with death to summon Mound Kings, move into blood magic for Horde from Hell, Succubus, and Arch Devil, shift capital production to Warlocks, or cast Gift of Reason on a Devil. It is likely you will have to do all of these to some extent, as your Devil production should be quite high as the game progresses. In an unusual twist, this guide should see EA Abysia well on the road to being a solid late game power. Typically Abysia does well early to mid by rushing Evocation and firespamming before magic provides solutions to counter their powerful units and fire magic, but then taper off later as opponents find answers to fire (Abysia is a bit of a one trick pony) or simply outproduce Abysia with its desperate need for both gold and resources. Here however, early game power should be used to expand and then stabilize the nation as the blood hunting economy begins and the research boosters are reached, putting a premium on conserving gold by refraining from recuiting Dragons, Warlocks, or Annointed without cause and generating power through blood forging rather than through recruiting units. Try to avoid recruiting too many Abysian infantry, or their upkeep and upfront cost will quickly ruin a nation. This has been HorrifyingThoughts, I hope this helps people consider Abysia as more than a weak nation.